You can deflect by talking about all the great injustices in the world but it doesn't make a difference. Everyone is talking about malicious prosecution but at the end of the day the guy was never convicted of anything. He never had his day in court. Who the fuck knows what would have happened.

Yes, banks and corporate powerhouses not only lie, cheat, and steal, but they are congratulated for it.

Meanwhile, college-age nobodies are prosecuted by the recording industry for downloading songs.

Capitalism is dead. This country is not an example of free-market, capitalist democracy. It is more totalitarian than capitalist. Individuals are meaningless, only existing to be bought and sold, over and over again, and used by politicians - who are nothing but shills for the corporations - to gain more and more power.

What year is it? 2013? Could have fooled me... it feels more like 1984.

People who can afford million dollar lawyers don't ever pay the real price of their crimes. And government seldom tries to dare.

It's clearly about power. If you are a huge company, you can outsource your workers' jobs, you are lauded by the market and reap the savings. If you are an individual who outsources your own job and reaps the savings, you get shitcanned for it. Same story, different page.

@3 - Capitalism is so not dead. Capitalism LOVES totalitarianism, they are best friends --(also, "capitalism" is an economic system, "totalitarianism" is a form of government. Don't let the "-isms" on the end confuse)--. If the gov't keeps the workers in line and hungry, then business has a handy pool of highly motivated wage-slaves to pick from. Companies like to deal with nice, clean lines and hierarchical decision makers. Things can move fast, efficiently, when decisions are made from the top, and enforced all the way down.

Democracy is slow and messy. Profit hates messy, it wants clean, "frictionless" efficiency.

Now where's my damn train..?

@5,
You're correct, I'm interchanging an economic system with a system of rule.

However, I'd still say we're not capitalist, most industries and markets in this country seem more like oligopolies. Any newcomers are quickly crushed or absorbed.

Capitalism is great for consumers, for the individual little people, but it's terrible for the big corporations. Big corporations want to be monopolies (more specifically, they want to be THE monopoly), and they're slowly getting there with every politician they buy who agrees to dismantle all regulations.

@6 - I will disagree with you again: Capitalism isn't terrible for big corporations, and capitalism doesn't stop monopolies... Government intervention and regulation stops monopolies from forming. That newcomers are crushed or absorbed by the big boys doesn't go against any capitalist "ruleset" that I know of. It may be ethically questionable to us, but capitalism has only one ethical rule: profit. It is a machine, with machine logic. Everything else is rationalization.

Ironically, Government also creates monopolies with state-owned enterprises, but those make sense when the good or service provided is a "public good"; like electricity, roads, the post office, transit, healthcare, police force, firefighters, and more, because a single publically-owned service provider can provide the service more cost-effectively than multiple competing enterprises (where the 'race to the bottom' of cheapness results in shoddy products and low wages. (Cf. Michigan: when it privatized state road maintenance in the late 90s, it cost over 2x more and resulted in worse roads.)

I don't think capitalism is particularly great for the little people: look at the low wages, use of prison labor (in the US, I mean), widespread lack of healthcare, valuing of bankers over teachers, and a marketplace flooded with cheap plastic shit, dubious products and planned obsolescence. Sure, "lap of luxury" and "living in the future" is great, and we are lucky, and capitalism shares part of the honor for that.

But left to its own devices --ie. without careful government (Public) regulation and oversight-- capitalism will happily build oligopolies and monopolies without thinking twice about it. They are a very natural extension of the core doctrine.

The project to dismantle government "intervention" and regulation has been underway since the late 70s (if not earlier), and the revolving doors between corporations and government have been constructed everywhere. We are, in fact, becoming quite fascist -- a system characterized by the close interweaving of the state (muscle) and business (money).

Sounds like we should have used drones against them.

@7,
I think we agree though.

Your third paragraph suggests capitalism isn't great for the little people because look at low wages, lack of health care, etc. But I'm arguing that the U.S. is not truly capitalist, so I agree that we have low wages and prison labor and so forth, but it can't be due to capitalism, because we're not running a capitalist marketplace.
The consumers don't have the choice to buy from a competitor that offers better wages and healthcare, because that competitor doesn't exist: The big, low wage, no healthcare competitor bought them out. You even describe it in your fourth paragraph. You suggest it is what capitalism will become; I suggest it's already there (and completely agree with your final paragraph).

I also agree with your initial paragraph. Capitalism doesn't stop monopolies, indeed, the ultimate end result of capitalism IS a monopoly. Only government regulations can curb capitalism by restricting the growth of big companies and fostering/subsudizing the growth of small ones. Obviously, that IS terrible for the big companies though. If it wasn't for government regs, unfettered, free-market capitalism would allow Disney, or Microsoft, or Time-Warner, or whoever, to buy out ALL their competitors and control everything, at which point it very naturally shifts from being capitalist to being monopolistic. Consumers drive competition, but eventually, one competitor gains a little advantage, buys some of the smaller ones, and then it becomes a compound interest problem from there. The consumers lose choices rapidly and are left with just one (or a couple).

Capitalism can only survive with regulations... with government. Without them, without government, capitalism will inevitably lead to a single business controlling all: Monopoly. The government forcing businesses to remain capitalistic - by breaking up monopolies and putting regs on big companies - is bad for companies who want to control everything.

The problem is, our government isn't doing it nearly enough.

So a company with negative profits, who built its audience by delivering goods to the suburbs electronically, putting bricks and mortar stores out of business, then plays the Seattle Card and crams all its employees into an urban vacuum, all the while they are being eaten by taxes and by those same bricks and mortar guys who finally figured out, heck, I can sell this stuff on a computer!

>Swartz actually faced over 30 years in prison for the victimless crime of "data theft."

You can't steal something you already own. Aaron paid his taxes like many Americans do, therefore these studies he downloaded were already public domain property and by extension we all own at least part of the documents. His crime is that of stealing something that was already open to the public at least in title, the prosecutors here are locking up government funded science by throwing people in jail and asking that we should be grateful for such generosity. They're like the church guarding with armed guards books because the peons aren't allowed knowledge even though their funds pay for it. The amount of shame doesn't even begin to announce the stunning lack of human scientific progress that can be linked to the actions of this single prosecutor, his vendetta of defending the walled gardens that we tried to break down will go down in the history books as one of the greediest moves someone ever made. For whatever personal gain this person might thinks comes from an action like this, he's currently most famous for defending public domain information. I hope he's proud of himself, because as far as humanity is concerned he's likely the biggest challenge we face for human progress in the 21st century, and to his family and friends I'm really sorry it's not your fault and please stop buying him gifts.